As ‘The X-Files’ Returns, Do We Still Want to Believe?

IN 2002, after 202 episodes of government conspiracies, bright lights in the sky, black oil, creepy monsters and sexual tension, “The X-Files” said goodbye. On Sunday on Fox, the F.B.I. agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) return for a six-part mini-series.

The New York Times TV critics James Poniewozik and Mike Hale emailed over encrypted lines from undisclosed locations to discuss the new series and the legacy of the original.

James Poniewozik For nine seasons (and two movies) “The X-Files” kept fans waiting for answers. You and I don’t need to. We’ve seen three of the six episodes, and people want the truth first: Are they any good?

Not at first, not at all. The first episode is called “My Struggle,” which aptly describes the experience of sitting through it. It lumbers. It plods. The actors chew sawdusty mouthfuls of expository dialogue. It introduces an Alex-Jones-like conspiracy-talk-show host (Joel McHale), who’s meant to be played straight but comes off like parody. Above all, it’s handicapped by the fact that it has to tear down much of the show’s mythology and construct a new one in an hour. It’s like rebuilding a sports car just to back it down the driveway.

Thankfully, the second episode shakes the dourness and gives Mulder and Scully more room to breathe. But it’s the third — a comic palate-cleanser in the “monster of the week” vein — that finally recreates the show’s oddball delights. As Scully says, in one of the script’s many meta comments, “I forgot how much fun these cases could be.” She’s right. Still, while “The X-Files” has a great legacy — on serial TV, on sci-fi and, thematically, on television at large — I wonder if its time has passed. Has the show changed, or have we?

Mike Hale Man, that first episode is a dud. You can understand the need to recapitulate, but not in such a flat-footed way. It’s like a greatest-hits reel — the phone call from Skinner, the shadowy warehouse, the abductee living in fear on a lonely road — with all the tension and excitement edited out.

To your question: “The X-Files” was a show about a certain mode of fear and style of conspiracy, and in the 14 years since it ended our culture has been overtaken by a new, more grim, more literal sense of fear. (The last season started on Nov. 11, 2001.) In the opening episode, the extended U.F.O. history lesson feels like a wrongheaded attempt to explain what all the excitement used to be about. In the exponentially better second and third episodes, the writers mostly ignore the time lapse, except to poke fun at Mulder’s incompetence with personal electronics. They’re confident that the show’s structure still stands up.

And about those writers. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, took on the challenge of the introductory episode, and you have to cut him some slack for that. But his record since 2002 consists of an O.K. film (“The X-Files: I Want to Believe”) and a terrible Amazon pilot (“The After”). Episode 2 was written and directed by James Wong, who co-wrote the original series’s first “monster of the week” episode, the extra creepy “Squeeze.” Episode 3 is by Darin Morgan, whose four scripts for the original show included two of the greats, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’” So maybe the improvement is no surprise. Looking ahead, we get Glen Morgan, Mr. Wong’s old writing partner, for the fourth episode, but then two Carter scripts to close out the mini-series. So, fingers crossed.

As a fan I loved the self-referentiality of the third episode — my favorite line was probably Mulder’s “I’m just looking for some internal logic” — but as a critic I wondered how interesting the episode would be for someone who hadn’t watched the show before. It was really heavy on the in-jokes. Did that bother you at all? Does it matter?

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Gillian Anderson, left, and Jonathan Whitesell in the second episode of “The X-Files” mini-series.CreditEd Araquel/Fox

Poniewozik From my perspective — I was obsessed back in the day, but have forgotten a ton since — the shout-outs are nice, but not essential. They get a bit much; after each “The truth is out there” and “The truth is in here” and “I want to believe” I half-expected the actors to hold for applause. This is definitely a project for the devout, which raises the question of who those folks are. There are original X-philes, of course, but the show also seems anecdotally to have had a strong afterlife on Netflix.

Which is interesting, because there’s something very prebinge about its structure — a ratio of a couple of stand-alone episodes for every mythology episode. That’s very much an artifact of the TV business of the ’90s. Before Netflix, before “Game of Thrones,” before “Breaking Bad” (from Vince Gilligan of “The X-Files”), complicated serial TV was considered a risk. (“Twin Peaks” was an exception, but also a cautionary tale.) Before DVRs and streaming made catching up easier, you might permanently lose viewers every time they missed an episode, so older TV was aimed at making every installment accessible to a brand-new audience. “The X-Files,” appropriately, was a DNA-engineered hybrid. Part of the time it was a complex sci-fi saga. Other times, it was an anthology — part “Twilight Zone,” part buddy-cop show. It contributed to the show’s surreal atmosphere, but I wonder if Mr. Carter would make the same show starting today — if an “X-Files” of 2016 would be “Lost” or “Black Mirror.”

Hale As long as you’re raising the mythology versus stand-alone debate, I’ll cast my vote for the stand-alones, though it’s not necessarily a fair fight. When you look back at the show across this many years, it makes sense that the well-made, self-contained stories with distinctive characters or unusual approaches would be the ones to adhere in the memory. I’m pleased that within the tight compass of this six-episode season they found room for at least one true monster-of-the-week episode.

Another thing I appreciated about that third episode (titled “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster”) was that it allowed Mr. Duchovny and Ms. Anderson to be a little silly. Humor, and those actors’ comic talents, were an important ingredient in the mix of the original series that gets overlooked. Mr. Duchovny, especially, is a natural comedian with a genius for self-deprecation. He still gives just the right note of innocent vanity to a line like: “I’m a middle-aged man, Scully. No, I am.” Like you, I’ve forgotten a lot, but it’s my sense that in general, mythology worked against humor — the serialized episodes had a severity to them, a “we’re being serious now” tone.

Poniewozik If there are two kinds of “X-Files” fans, I am a committed Mythologist, though the new episodes do have me wondering if the Monsterists were right. With a few exceptions — the milestone “Paper Clip” in Season 3 — the serial episodes aren’t the show’s greatest, individually. But they made it special, and influential: The yarn on every Carrie Mathison conspiracy-bulletin-board-of-crazy leads back to them. It’s hard to recreate that 1990s paranoid magic now simply by grafting on a few Edward Snowden references.

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Amanda Burke, left, with David Duchovny in the second episode of “The X-Files” mini-series.CreditEd Araquel/Fox

When the new episodes work, it’s because Mulder and Scully work. One thing I like about the new stand-alone episodes is that they’re not entirely static; they carry the weight of history between these characters. (Oh yeah, remember that they had a kid together?) Even the lighter third episode reminds us how experience has changed their perspectives. Mulder has been burned enough to be dubious, while Scully has seen enough to be open to the impossible.

It’s especially good to see Ms. Anderson, such a beacon of intensity in “The Fall,” get to flex her dry humor again. When she pulls an obscure fact out of thin air, as Scully is wont to do, she shrugs it off in a way that both acknowledges how much time has passed and tells us the important things haven’t changed. “I’m old school, Mulder,” she says. “Pre-Google.”

HaleIt all comes back to Mulder and Scully, which is to say Mr. Duchovny and Ms. Anderson. It’s the main reason the mostly Mulder-less final seasons were so flavorless, even though the writing was often at the same level.

Many shows have tried to follow the “X-Files” template to one degree or another, but they’re always missing that Mulder-Scully umami. “Fringe” tried to reconstitute it with Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson as an F.B.I. agent and a skeptical civilian. “Supernatural” cut women out of the equation and made the show’s demon hunters two brothers whose devotion was to each other.

Chris Carter was reviving a television tradition of science-fiction-inflected horror (or horror-inflected science fiction) that ran from “The Twilight Zone” to “Night Gallery” to “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” but his and his writers’ great contribution was the addition of flirtatiousness and genuine adult emotion to the mix. The legacy of “The X-Files” may be that it made TV hospitable again to a range of genre shows after the sitcom domination of the 1980s, helping pave the way for future fantasists like J. J. Abrams and Joss Whedon. But when it was at its best, the show was equal parts suspense, horror, science fiction — and romance.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: 14 Years Later, Do We Still Want to Believe? . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe